INVERMAY — John Stewart and his son Henry are delivering the latest addition to their Black Angus herd.

At least this little fellow has decided to come into the world during daylight in a warmer, drier cattle pen.

Cattlemen like the Stewarts often find themselves getting up in the middle of cold, wet spring nights when cows seem to want to calve.

But for John Stewart, getting up in the middle of a cold, wet, spring night has become an annual ritual for another less pleasant reason. In most of years, he’s had to get up to deal with fast-rising floodwater he said is caused by illegal drainage.

“It’s good during the day and in three hours, 70 to 80 per cent of my farm is underwater,” Stewart said of his quarter section here, some 240 kilometres northeast of Regina.

Such flooding may even be having a serious impact on his 140-head, cow-calf operation.

After a slight increase in calf deaths, Stewart had his well tested only to find out his water was “no good” — likely, as a result of flooding contamination since his well water quality was fine when he bought his property.

Stewart approached the Saskatchewan Water Security Agency (WSA) a few years ago and was told the old process involved registering complaints against his neighbours responsible for the illegal drainage.

An initial nine complaints morphed into 59 after the WSA mapped out the entire area contributing to the flooding of his home quarter section.

“I hate to say it, but Water Security is making us the bad guys,” Stewart said, expressing frustration with the past WSA process but also with the agency’s suggestion that the solution may be expropriating his land to build yet another ditch.

John Stewart, right, speaks at his kitchen table about the farm’s flooding situation. His son Henry holds a photo showing the water’s proximity to their house.Michael Bell /
Regina Leader-Post

In his modest farm house, where the foundation and walls have been badly damaged by 1.2 metres of basement water after repeated spring flooding, Stewart produces an 84-square-kilometre (20,750 acres) map from the WSA that illustrates the watershed drainage — man-made and natural.

The map shows two crooked blue lines that are the small creeks in the area. But even more predominate are upwards of a hundred little yellow squiggly lines — man-made drainage ditches that have mostly been dug without legal permits.

If one could pull back to a satellite view of Stewart’s map, those squiggly yellow track marks of man-made drainage ditches would grow into thousands and then tens of thousands and then hundreds of thousands by the time you could see Saskatchewan’s trapezoid borders.

The WSA estimates there are now 100,000 to 150,000 unlicensed drainage sites in the province.

What started decades ago as farmers draining potholes by hand with shovels grew into farmers using small machinery then backhoes and now giant trackhoes to — quite literally — change the Saskatchewan landscape.

A Water Security Agency map. Blue lines indicate the natural flow of water on the land. Yellow lines indicate places where farmers have drained their land.Michael Bell /
Regina Leader-Post

Stewart actually sympathizes with many of his neighbours and friends — many of whom are just trying to cope with the drainage problem foisted upon them.

High land and input costs mean some farmers cannot afford to have a crop drowned out by flooding.

But for others, Stewart has considerably less sympathy.

“If you drain every slough and pothole and push every tree (down), you have nothing left for wildlife,” Stewart said, adding bigger farmers prone to using illegal drainage tell their neighbours they will either dig them a drainage ditch or buy them out.

“What are you leaving for future generations?”

It can be rather profitable to buy cheap, low-taxed land that hasn’t been previously seeded and raze the sloughs and scrub brush to grow profitable crops.

There were 24 million seeded acres in 1975, but that number vaulted to 33 million seeded acres by 1995, then 36.7 million acres by 2015.

It’s certainly been good for agriculture productivity. Saskatchewan’s 37,000 farmers (down from 71,000 farmers in 1975) in 2014 already met the target set by Premier Brad Wall’s Saskatchewan Party government to increase crop production by 10 million tonnes by 2020.

But what’s been good for agricultural production hasn’t been so great for harmony in rural Saskatchewan communities.

“We’ve been told: ‘Go back to Ontario where you came from,’ ” said Stewart, who moved to this province from Markham, Ont. a decade ago. “ ‘That that’s not how we do things around here’ …

“Bought out. Drowned out. Or burnt out,” Henry said, describing the threatening language directed at him and his father during one conversation.

“Can you imagine people telling you that?” John Stewart asked.

Stewart said he’s had to replace a tractor he believes was vandalized. And on one occasion, he was awakened in the middle of the night by a trespasser he said he chased out of his yard.

The incidents have been reported to the RCMP, the Invermay farmer said.

A meeting with WSA officials has been scheduled in nearby Margo to discuss the drainage issue. The Stewarts hold out hope some resolution can be found.

What is clear is that Stewarts’ situation is not unique.

Robbie Stuart sits at his computer at his home. His farm is adjacent to the Lawrie Creek.Michael Bell /
Regina Leader-Post

About 60 kilometres south of here, near Theodore, Robbie Stuart sits at the computer in his farmhouse, showing a video of what happened to the Lawrie Creek after a two-day rain event in June 2014.

A swollen Lawrie Creek on June 19, 2014 breached its banks by June 23. “Here is something I wouldn’t have seen for the first 30 years of my life,” said the 59-year-old, describing the June 23 rising creek that hammered the hay land he needs for his 110-head cattle operation.

The next video shot on June 30, shows a small lake. It seems like the entire Lawrie Creek watershed has spilled onto his land.

Stuart also contends his flooding is the result of decades of illegal drainage that’s not being discouraged by either the rural municipality or even the provincial government.

“If they seed it, they can claim it as crop insurance,” Stuart said. “They’re not draining potholes anymore. They are draining sloughs 10 feet deep.”

Stuart’s last video is of a giant trackhoe in the winter digging out a nearby slough as Caterpillars wait to level of the land.

As a result, the nearby Lawrie Creek that used to flood once every 20 years when he was young is now flooding every three or four years.

“I can’t make hay in a timely manner,” Stuart said. A silage bale from July that can feed 20 cows can feed only 12 cows if it it’s baled in August and only nine cows if it’s baled in September.

But what seems to bother the affable farmer-rancher even more is the hard feelings over water that have arisen in his tight-knit rural community.

“I’ve had offers to relocate my moustache to opposite side of my face,” Stuart chuckled. “Some guy came up to me and said I was the biggest f…… arsehole ever.”

As unwelcome as these nasty, local exchanges are, illegal drainage has created an even bigger problem — one in which talk turns to pending environmental disaster.

And nowhere is the concern bigger than at the Quill Lakes, some 200 kilometres north of Regina.

“I never saw anything like it. It was unbelievable,” said Ray Orb, president of Saskatchewan Association of Rural Municipalities (SARM), describing his Quill Lake flyover last year with officials from Ducks Unlimited.

In a joint news release by SARM and Ducks Unlimited after that trip, the organizations noted “interconnected drainage ditches, clearly visible from above, lead to downstream flooding — just one of the possible negative outcomes of illegal drainage of our wetlands.”

What was once three lakes — Big Quill, Little Quill and Mud Lake — has now become one big lake that’s exceeded its banks by 6.8 metres.

In 2010, the area saw the second-highest recorded precipitation levels. The highest recorded precipitation was in 1923 (800 mm), and the Quill Lakes never flooded like they have every year in recent times.

With no natural outflow from these “terminal basin lakes,” drainage is causing the Quill’s saline water to spill its banks. There has been 30,000 acres of private land flooded, plus an additional 32,000 acres of Crown land.

Alvin Amendt, left, speaks about how drainage and flooding has impacted his farm. Amendt, who farms near Janswn, lost two quarters of land to flooding in 2009, and another two-and-a-half quarters in 2014.Michael Bell /
Regina Leader-Post

Alvin Amendt, a Jansen-area farmer, lost two quarters of land in 2009 and another two and half quarters to 2014 to the rising Quill Lakes flood waters.

“How are you going to get it (the land) back when the water keeps coming up?” asked Amendt, his pickup parked on a man-made berm that’s attempting to hold the water back.

Ironically, Amendt is one of those landowners who thinks the existing Saskatchewan drainage regulations are already too restrictive because they aren’t allowing the Quill Lakes to dispense with rising water.

A berm adjacent to Quill Lake, east of Jansen. The lake’s water levels have risen over recent years, flooding thousands of acres of farmland and threatening infrastructure.Michael Bell /
Regina Leader-Post

As a result of the flood, Amendt is one of many area farmers contemplating suing the government over losses.

Lawsuits are just but one of the big potential costs associated with flood damage.

Additional crop insurance costs and increased costs of the provincial disaster assistance program (PDAP) are also costing taxpayers for a problem that is, essentially, a man-made one.

Orb said flooded out grid road repair and increased installation of culverts have cost rural municipalities millions of dollars.

Flooding costs are now annually plaguing the Saskatchewan Highways Ministry as seen last year when a major section of the Yellowhead Highway and the Canadian National Railway line near Kandahar were damaged by the Quills spilling their banks.

John Pomeroy, Canada Research Chair in Water Resources and Climate Change at the University of Saskatchewan, said we simply have “stop what we are doing.”

Many lakes and creeks in Saskatchewan and western Manitoba were created when the Lake Agassiz glacier retreated 10,000 to 30,000 years ago.

The mile-thick ice scraped our flat topography, leaving behind small lakes, sloughs, potholes, and creeks with reeds, willows and poplars that soaked up high precipitation before it could make it to a river.

Pomeroy calls these “fill and spill sloughs” where only five- to 15-per-cent of precipitation makes its way into flowing rivers.

However, Pomeroy said that is changing “much faster than anyone imagined.”

The hydrologist has extensively studied the basin of the Smith Creek that flows near Langenburg along the Manitoba-Saskatchewan border.

There, the 98 square kilometres of wetlands (24 per cent) in the Smith Creek River Basin in 1958 has been reduced to 43 square kilometres (11 per cent) of wetlands today.

The flow of a once dry-in-the-summer creek has increased fourfold since 1995. Pomeroy now calls the Smith Creek basin “the biggest hydrological change on the planet.”

Add into the equation the increased frequency of multiple-day rain events like what Stuart experienced in 2014, and Pomeroy fears that the Quill Lakes are our next potential disaster.

“A potential disaster is always a series of unfortunate events,” Pomeroy said.

Should the next spring flood or major rain event hit the Quill Lake, its saltier water could overflow into Last Mountain Lake and the Qu’Appelle chain.

Many believe it could be a disaster for cottage owners and sports fishing, although there is much debate on how much damage Quill Lakes’ naturally-occurring salt may cause.

Of less debate, however, is the tonnes of nutrients and phosphates from farmers’ fields picked up by flood waters that are being deposited in all southern Saskatchewan Lakes, including those in the Qu’Appelle chain.

That causes earlier and more severe blooms of algae nearly every year.

“We were told the water was very, very sick,” said AuraLee MacPherson, whose family has owned a cottage at Katepwa since the 1930s.

Algae bloom became a particular problem at Katepwa after a three-day rain event in June 2014, MacPherson said.

MacPherson doesn’t consider herself an “eco-warrior,” but she has become active with other cottage owners and the Pasqua First Nation in lobbying the government to address the potential of Quill Lakes’ water spilling into the Qu’Appelle chain.

“When did we become a province of ditch diggers, where we just move our problems elsewhere?” she asked.

“Money always seems to trump.”

Orb said SARM has heard such concerns, but added his organization has little control over individual RMs that are likely divided on the issue.

That seemed evident in one of SARM’s convention resolutions last week opposing Bill 44 — new legislation that will help toughen the already existing regulations on drainage and move from a “complaint-based” system to a “permit-based system.”

“If you have 100 farmers in a room, 50 want to get rid of the water to stop (illegal drainage),” Orb said.

Environment Minister Scott Moe, responsible for the WSA, acknowledged the Quill Lakes are a unique problem and that the WSA had trouble keeping up with the complaints in the past.

But the environment minister has faith that Bill 44, Amendments to the Water Security Act, will address issues without having to impose a moratorium on all drainage.

“The goal is to control (drainage),” he said.

In the legislature Tuesday, Moe spoke on 2nd reading amendments to the Water Security Act that incorporate recommendations from the Provincial Ombudsman and producer groups.

His theme was a co-operative approach works best.

Moe cited his Feb. 16 announcement on Dry Lake — a joint agreement involving 73 landowners in the Gooseberry Lake Watershed in southeastern Saskatchewan to better control overflows and reduce flooding downstream in the Moose Mountain Creek and Souris River.

The agreement includes 30 gate structures that will be operated by landowners to hold back water and is thought to the biggest drainage approval in the province’s history.

But while the government speaks of co-operative agreements, it’s still apparent the rural-based Sask. Party government remains exceedingly cautious about saying farmers have broken the law in the past.

“The new drainage regulations will get that message out that drainage needs to be permitted,” said Agriculture Minister Lyle Stewart after the Feb. 16 announcement. “It never was — I hate to use the word legal or illegal — but it’s never been authorized to just drain onto your neighbour or into even a water body without some scrutiny or permitting,” Stewart said.

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